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Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, is fighting to change the country’s
“peace constitution” in an historic step that will divide public opinion and
further anger Tokyo’s already touchy neighbours.

Mr Abe, who is riding a wave of popular support for his economic policies,
promised to “make a new constitution with our own hands”, 66 years after the
“occupation army” of the United States imposed the current model on the

defeated nation. It will bring him into confrontation with many in East Asia
who regard the constitution, with its promise never to resort to war, as a bastion
against military

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In the People’s Liberation Army, it is referred to simply as the "Japanese problem" — a creeping realisation that, just when China had come to think of its neighbour as a docile nation, tamed after the Second World War, it is preparing to turn back the clock.

For Chinese analysts such as Liu Jiangyong, a professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University, Mr Abe’s revision of Article 96 could lead to a domino-like collapse of all limits on Japan’s use of military force. China, its military budget already growing by more than 10 per cent a year, might feel even more inclined to begin an arms race.

Beijing has paid minute attention to the words and deeds of Shinzo Abe since his inauguration, searching for any sign that Tokyo might project its military power abroad.

When Mr Abe cited Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands-era remarks about the "rule of law at sea" during a discussion about disputed islands, China began to prickle. In Beijing, it sounded awfully as if Mr Abe was weighing a Thatcher-style dispatch of naval task forces.

When Mr Abe chose January 30 to announce his plans to change Article 96, China questioned the timing. Was it mere coincidence that the new Prime Minister had spoken on the day that, 80 years earlier, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic?

Tensions over the disputed Senkaku islands have prompted practical, strategic concerns about what Japan might look like in a real fight. The answers, for the PLA, are not comforting. China may have a new aircraft carrier and the fastest-growing military budget in the world, but it is no match for Japan’s high-tech, US-trained forces.

The authorities have allowed state-owned media to pontificate angrily to a domestic audience raised on tales of Japan’s bloodthirsty, 20th-century history in Asia. "We should never forget that conflict with Japan twice shattered China’s dream of modernisation," one commentator wrote in the nationalistic tabloid Global Times.